Re: Uranium/Lead Dating Provides Most Accurate Date Yet for Earth's Largest Extinction

From: Mike Maxwell (maxwell_at_ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: 09/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:04:26 -0400
To: Ron <baalke@earthlink.net>

Ron wrote:
> Uranium/lead dating provides most accurate date yet for Earth's
> largest extinction...
> the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic
> period - 252.6 million years ago, plus or minus 200,000 years.

I believe Mark Twain had a more accurate dating:

> Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific
> people, and 'let on' to prove what had occurred in the
> remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the
> recent past, or what will occur in the far future
> by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity
> is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact
> data to argue from! Nor 'development of species,' either!
> Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague.
> Please observe:--
>
> In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
> Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two
> miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a
> third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not
> blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian
> Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower
> Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred
> thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico
> like a fishing-rod.

I think that would have been November 1884, so we can calculate the date
as 1,000,120 years this coming November.

Of course, the Silurian came before the Permian/ Triassic, but clearly
the dates given in the above article are in error.

        --Life on the Mississippi

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